What is the best way to find the period of a (repeating) list in Mathematica?

Question

What is the best way to find the period in a repeating list?

For example:

a = {4, 5, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 1, 2}

has repeat

Answer 1

Please see the comments interspersed with the code on how it works.

(* True if a has period p *)
testPeriod[p_, a_] := Drop[a, p] === Drop[a, -p]

(* are all the list elements the same? *)
homogeneousQ[list_List] := Length@Tally[list] === 1
homogeneousQ[{}] := Throw[$Failed] (* yes, it's ugly to put this here ... *)

(* auxiliary for findPeriodOfFirstElement[] *)
reduce[a_] := Differences@Flatten@Position[a, First[a], {1}]

(* the first element occurs every ?th position ? *)
findPeriodOfFirstElement[a_] := Module[{nl},
  nl = NestWhileList[reduce, reduce[a], ! homogeneousQ[#] &];
  Fold[Total@Take[#2, #1] &, 1, Reverse[nl]]
  ]

(* the period must be a multiple of the period of the first element *)
period[a_] := Catch@With[{fp = findPeriodOfFirstElement[a]},
   Do[
    If[testPeriod[p, a], Return[p]],
    {p, fp, Quotient[Length[a], 2], fp}
    ]
   ]

---

Please ask if findPeriodOfFirstElement[] is not clear. I did this independently (for fun!), but now I see that the principle is the same as in Verbeia's solution, except the problem pointed out by Brett is fixed.

I was testing with

b = RandomInteger[100, {1000}];
a = Flatten[{ConstantArray[b, 1000], Take[b, 27]}];

(Note the low integer values: there will be lots of repeating elements within the same period *)

---

EDIT: According to Leonid's comment below, another 2-3x speedup (~2.4x on my machine) is possible by using a custom position function, compiled specifically for lists of integers:

(* Leonid's reduce[] *)

myPosition = Compile[
  {{lst, _Integer, 1}, {val, _Integer}}, 
  Module[{pos = Table[0, {Length[lst]}], i = 1, ctr = 0}, 
    For[i = 1, i <= Length[lst], i++, 
      If[lst[[i]] == val, pos[[++ctr]] = i]
    ]; 
    Take[pos, ctr]
  ], 
  CompilationTarget -> "C", RuntimeOptions -> "Speed"
]

reduce[a_] := Differences@myPosition[a, First[a]]

Compiling testPeriod gives a further ~20% speedup in a quick test, but I believe this will depend on the input data:

Clear[testPeriod]
testPeriod = 
 Compile[{{p, _Integer}, {a, _Integer, 1}}, 
  Drop[a, p] === Drop[a, -p]]